Canonical asks desktop users to “pay what you think Ubuntu is worth”

Canonical has long made the most popular desktop version of Linux, but actually making money off Ubuntu is easier said than done. When a typical user downloads Ubuntu for free and installs it on a computer with a Windows license that the user did pay for, Canonical gets nothing in the form of payment.

There's nothing wrong with that—this is the open source world, after all, and many people contribute to Ubuntu with code rather than money. But starting this week, Canonical is presenting desktop OS downloaders with an optional donation form.

"Pay what you think it's worth," and "Show Ubuntu some love" are among the messages users will see, and downloaders can direct their donations to specific parts of Ubuntu development. The options are "Make the desktop more amazing"; "Performance optimisation for games and apps"; "Improve hardware support on more PCs"; "Phone and tablet versions of Ubuntu"; "Community participation in Ubuntu development"; "Better coordination with Debian and upstreams"; "Better support for flavours like Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu"; "Tip to Canonical—they help make it happen."

By default, the page puts in $2 for each, a total donation of $16. Depending on what you contribute, Canonical shows what else you could buy with that money. Bizarrely, $200 equates to "the price of a pair of sexed Emu chicks." The most you can donate at once is $1,000, or "the price of an eight year-old dromedary camel."

Once you donate, the Ubuntu desktop starts downloading. Or, you can just skip the donation and download the OS for free, just as you always could. For some reason, the donation page is not presented to Ubuntu Server users.

Canonical accepted donations prior to this week, but in a blog post about the move yesterday, Canonical VP Steve George wrote "we're making it easier for people to financially contribute to Ubuntu if they want to."

"By allowing Ubuntu users to choose which elements of Ubuntu they’re most excited about, we’ll get direct feedback on which favourite features or projects deserve the bulk of our attention," he wrote. "We’re letting users name their price—depending on the value that they put on the operating system or other aspects of our work. That price can, of course, be zero—but every last cent helps make Ubuntu better."

Ubuntu isn't the only Linux desktop distribution looking for donations. Linux Mint (which is based on Ubuntu code) does as well, for example. While Canonical gives away its software for free, it is a private company rather than strictly a community project, and some people may not feel comfortable donating to a business rather than a charity.

Although Distrowatch shows Ubuntu as being only the third most popular Linux distribution (after Mint and Mageia), a more extensive and likely more accurate gauge of real-world use comes from a Wikimedia traffic analysis report. Over the most recent 12-month period, Ubuntu accounted for 1.1 billion hits to Wikimedia, with the next-most popular Linux desktop distribution—Red Hat's Fedora—accounting for 36.7 million.

Yet after eight years in business, it's not even clear whether Canonical is profitable. The company has branched out with business products and support, struck distribution deals with desktop hardware vendors, and is eyeing mobile devices, but it doesn't seem to be enough. Witness a recent move to add Amazon search results into Ubuntu's desktop search tool, in order to get money through affiliate links.

Some users were disturbed by the Amazon move, telling Canonical Founder Mark Shuttleworth so in the comments on his blog. But even users who don't want Amazon search results when they're searching for a file on their desktop may want to support Ubuntu financially. Providing an easy-to-find donation page and the option to direct money to whichever part of Ubuntu development one prefers seems like a reasonable way to raise money without affecting the behavior of the operating system itself.

Promoted Comments

I predict that people will go crazy about this, even though IMO there's no reason to.

I would like to point this out though:

Quote:

Although Distrowatch shows Ubuntu as being only the third most popular Linux distribution (after Mint and Mageia), a more extensive and likely more accurate gauge of real-world use comes from a Wikimedia traffic analysis report. Over the most recent 12-month period, Ubuntu accounted for 1.1 billion hits to Wikimedia, with the next-most popular Linux desktop distribution—Red Hat's Fedora—accounting for 36.7 million.

Currently I use Linux Mint. This is the default user agent string reported to websites by Firefox in Linux Mint:

I'd venture to guess that most/all Ubuntu derivatives say the same. Now, if all Debian derivatives' browsers reported as being Debian, that would be a number to see, since of course it would include Ubuntu + vanilla Debian, among others.

So while I do understand that Distrowatch results are not particularly reliable, the Wikimedia results don't seem at all useful to compare the relative popularity of Ubuntu to other distros. Not that we don't all know that Ubuntu is popular a heck, but I just don't think those numbers are particularly informative.

And to be clear, I'm not on any kind of Anti-Ubuntu crusade -- I'm giving Mint until 12.10 release date to woo me away from Ubuntu, just for fun.

ATM the more likely scenario seems to be that I'll wind up giong back to Ubuntu, but installing Cinnamon from some PPA...

"The DistroWatch Page Hit Ranking statistics are a light-hearted way of measuring the popularity of Linux distributions and other free operating systems among the visitors of this website. They correlate neither to usage nor to quality and should not be used to measure the market share of distributions. They simply show the number of times a distribution page on DistroWatch.com was accessed each day, nothing more."

I predict that people will go crazy about this, even though IMO there's no reason to.

I would like to point this out though:

Quote:

Although Distrowatch shows Ubuntu as being only the third most popular Linux distribution (after Mint and Mageia), a more extensive and likely more accurate gauge of real-world use comes from a Wikimedia traffic analysis report. Over the most recent 12-month period, Ubuntu accounted for 1.1 billion hits to Wikimedia, with the next-most popular Linux desktop distribution—Red Hat's Fedora—accounting for 36.7 million.

Currently I use Linux Mint. This is the default user agent string reported to websites by Firefox in Linux Mint:

I'd venture to guess that most/all Ubuntu derivatives say the same. Now, if all Debian derivatives' browsers reported as being Debian, that would be a number to see, since of course it would include Ubuntu + vanilla Debian, among others.

So while I do understand that Distrowatch results are not particularly reliable, the Wikimedia results don't seem at all useful to compare the relative popularity of Ubuntu to other distros. Not that we don't all know that Ubuntu is popular a heck, but I just don't think those numbers are particularly informative.

And to be clear, I'm not on any kind of Anti-Ubuntu crusade -- I'm giving Mint until 12.10 release date to woo me away from Ubuntu, just for fun.

ATM the more likely scenario seems to be that I'll wind up giong back to Ubuntu, but installing Cinnamon from some PPA...

I have used Ubuntu off and on over the past 4 years or so. Mint is now my distro of choice due to it's more user friendly UI. Ubuntu's UI was very user friendly back when I had my first encounter with v8.4. But now it can be a quite a challenge to navigate.

As far as money goes, you can't really blame them for asking. If you don't ask you wont receive. The fact that they need funds is probably directly connected to the facts I stated earlier. If you over engineer something to the point of having it become user unfriendly obviously fewer people will want it, and the advertisers know that.

Here's the actual contribution screen that you're sent to after picking a version of Ubuntu to download from the main page. Throwing up a big ol' donation screen in front of the download seems obtrusive. The option to skip all donations is rather de-emphasized. I'd prefer it to be at the top and more clearly distinguished from the rest of the page if they're going to go this route, since the vast majority of people will want to skip donating entirely and just want their .iso file. If they're going to put an extra step in the way, I feel the least they could do is make it as little of an obstacle as possible. Also, "Make the desktop more amazing" probably means "prioritize Unity development." Unity has its fans, but also a lot of detractors. Without a more granular form of feedback than assuming everyone who chips in wants more Unity, for example, I can see that push being a sticking point for some.

Funny note: a donation of $7 is compared to the price of a "Royale with Cheese."

Just installed Ubuntu and Ubuntu studio (12.04) on the newly-rebuilt box last week. Not a huge fan of the Unity desktop, but I can live with it. Had I seen that donation page, I probably would have kicked in a couple of bucks. Ubuntu has its warts, but of the distros I've played with at home (SuSE, Fedora, Gentoo) it's been the least painful to deal with on a day to day basis. Gentoo was fun for a while, but it got cattywumpus on me and I got tired of fighting it. Ubuntu's generally been pretty solid.

I fear that Canonical has missed the "donation" boat by their prior actions to earn money from other projects' efforts and by not keeping with the spirit of F/LOSS.

If a software package that Ubuntu includes has a money-making method, Canonical should never touch that code, effectly stealing the income for that other project. They've screwed up multiple times previously which lost my faith.

The company has every right to earn a living for itself and the employees. I have no issue with them embedding Amazon Search into the desktop, provided it can be disabled. As an OS maker, we expect more control over our privacy. That trust is easy to lose and hard to regain. The Amazon search feature will make money AND doesn't step on some other project's funding model, at least not directly. I just hope it doesn't turn into another built-in user tracking capability. If that happens, there are lots of other alternative distros.

Seriously, what is people's problem with Unity? Personally, I like my OS to have a GUI that actually looks decent and is reletively easy to use. The bars at the top and bottom of the Gnome desktop made me feel like my computer was in some sort of box and all I had was this little peep hole to see it through. Unity is pretty simple to use and doesn't look like it's stuck in 1999. And the beauty of linux is that if you don't like something, you are welcome and even encouraged to use something else.

Hmm interesting.. I might throw a few bucks this way, currently I'm running a dual-boot win7 / Mint at home, windows is just for gaming as I haven't yet really tried out Wine, and then I am quite happy running Mint for everything else. I also have a fedora file server set up in my laundry room, and can see a donation... or possibly a nice Linux poster to hang up in my office

I get that people don't like Unity. I'm not a huge fan myself. However, I think Ubuntu's tendency to push the envelope is a good thing. Linux on the desktop seemed to stagnate for a long time, but now we are seeing some real changes (such as Wayland) in the pipeline. So even if you hate Unity, you should seriously consider throwing a few bucks Ubuntu's way.

And the beauty of linux is that if you don't like something, you are welcome and even encouraged to use something else.

I think that's a rather disingenuous argument. Ubuntu is built around the Unity desktop, it's not just a piece of software that happens to be part of the distro.

As long as you can easily run Ubuntu with anther desktop, I'd say it does just happen to be part of the distro. It's like IE or Safari (on OS X), it happens to be there, but you're free to use whatever browser you want. If it were like Safari on iOS, that might be a problem (e.g. always the default).

I'd donate if "Improve support for games" was an option. Optimizing your dirt poor gaming support is of no use to me.

The sooner I can leave Windows the better. But I'm not leaving until Ubuntu can run games.

It can and does so just fine. Even emulated.

I'm pretty sure tyrsius meant running new games from main publishers. A very small fraction of those are available for Linux (indie devs seem much more receptive to Linux though). Another small fraction can be run through WINE with PlayOnLinux. The rest do not work, period. Hopefully Steam on Linux will influence this some.

As a side note, the two reasons I keep Windows around are (1) games and (2) Microsoft Office. Yes, I can (and do) run office in a VM, but I like to be able to have multiple documents up on multiple monitors, which VirtualBox does not really support.

I get that people don't like Unity. I'm not a huge fan myself. However, I think Ubuntu's tendency to push the envelope is a good thing. Linux on the desktop seemed to stagnate for a long time, but now we are seeing some real changes (such as Wayland) in the pipeline. So even if you hate Unity, you should seriously consider throwing a few bucks Ubuntu's way.

"Pushing the envelope" is never an adequate excuse to destroy legacy interfaces that people have already learned and are productive with.

If you want a tabletized GUI with no good options for remote usage, buy a Mac.

I get that people don't like Unity. I'm not a huge fan myself. However, I think Ubuntu's tendency to push the envelope is a good thing. Linux on the desktop seemed to stagnate for a long time, but now we are seeing some real changes (such as Wayland) in the pipeline. So even if you hate Unity, you should seriously consider throwing a few bucks Ubuntu's way.

"Pushing the envelope" is never an adequate excuse to destroy legacy interfaces that people have already learned and are productive with.

If you want a tabletized GUI with no good options for remote usage, buy a Mac.

Some of us want more then a CLI. And aren't the options for remote usage on a Mac basically the same as the options on Linux?

Edit - I guess it is easier to remotely manage a Linux machine. I tend to use my Powerbook to connect to my Linux box, not the other way around.

I've been saying this for a while now, but if games and Microsoft Exchange were supported natively, I'd switch. I understand both of those things aren't completely within their control, but that's what it takes. I mean, I'd take a mail client that supported ActiveSync like Mac Mail does.

I'm utterly in favour of this. I've wanted to just donate for Ubuntu for a while now - it's worth much more to me than Windows ever was. (Or will be, at Microsoft's current prices. The OEM price is almost fair - but the full retail price is just insane!)

If there's one thing that does annoy me occasionally amongst the Free Software community, it's the way that some people seem to conflate Freedom with Free, and then decide they don't need to pay for software. The freetards (as they're referred to elsewhere) just don't help the cause of quality software. Paying a reasonable price should always be an option that we have available, even we do think of it as a donation.

They owe me money then, because I wasted hours upon hours trying to make Ubuntu run 1- at all, 2- satisfactorily, 3- well.

Failed at stage 1 quite some times. Please stop including beta bootloaders like grub2 in official distros; The dev I talked to was nice, but failing at boot for 3 weeks -> back to Windows for my AMD based PC.

Failed at stage 2 most of the time. Please stop using beta UIs in official distros. A fixed menu bar on the left ? really ? No easy way to link different folders ? Having to choose drivers depending on whether you want things reliable, or video acceleration ?

And never reached stage 3. I'm still not sure if Ubuntu can handle 2 screens of different resolutions, and never got the RDP client nor server to work, and VNC sucks.

Nothing wrong with asking.I used Ubuntu awhile but Unity just wore me out. Unity looks beautiful to be sure but functionality-wise it's kinda cumbersome. Mint/Cinnamon is where I am now and it's really nice.

They owe me money then, because I wasted hours upon hours trying to make Ubuntu run 1- at all, 2- satisfactorily, 3- well.

Failed at stage 1 quite some times. Please stop including beta bootloaders like grub2 in official distros; The dev I talked to was nice, but failing at boot for 3 weeks -> back to Windows for my AMD based PC.

Failed at stage 2 most of the time. Please stop using beta UIs in official distros. A fixed menu bar on the left ? really ? No easy way to link different folders ? Having to choose drivers depending on whether you want things reliable, or video acceleration ?

And never reached stage 3. I'm still not sure if Ubuntu can handle 2 screens of different resolutions, and never got the RDP client nor server to work, and VNC sucks.

Oh, how I wish it worked that way.

For the issues I've had with getting some vendors' software to work, I could retire.

And for the payments they owe me for data lost to their bugs, I could take that retirement and buy myself a small nation in which to enjoy it...

(No, I won't name the vendor.)

Sadly, it doesn't work that way. If it did, many companies would have been bankrupted YEARS ago...

Count me as another Mint w/Cinnamon user. I used to be a Ubuntu user until they introduced Unity. To their credit, Unity has been improved in recent releases, but not enough for me to ditch Mint and switch back.